Visible Daily-Earth: May 16, 2012

This is a test of the code for our new Visible Daily-Earth project where we will have a true-color global picture of Earth generated daily from geostationary satellites (Figure 1). These are the only satellites that can take the whole Earth in a single shot, but unfortunately not in true-colors and this will be the tricky part of the project. Here we are showing a black and white test version for May 16, 2012 at five different times corresponding to a nearly full-phase Earth as seen by the satellites on those times (Figure 2).

Figure 1. Diagram showing the relative view area of five geostationary meteorological satellites.

Figure 2. The visible Earth on May 16, 2012 at five different times (UTC). The images are generated starting the day in the Australia zone and as Earth rotates ending in the Pacific. Here are a 4MP and 48MP high resolution versions. CREDIT: PHL @ UPR Arecibo, EUMETSAT, NERC Satellite Receiving Station, University of Dundee.